I've been coming back,looking for that example you were going to post....

Are you seeing this in JPEG capture, RAW capture, or both?

I ask as Panasonic has always been very good recentlyat including distortion correction in their JPEG engine. It was always very well controlled in FZ18 images I've seen, and in the TZ3/TZ5 I have owned myself, but when you shoot RAW you bypass the JPEG processing, so distortion you would not see with an in-camera JPEG is revealed with the RAW file because RAW files are supposedly untouched and all processing, including distortion correction,is allup to you.

I have a FZ18 and while I did not notice a lot of problem with barrel distortion, as I seldom use WA, but even when I did ,I thought it was not bad.......But at Xmas time I was taking photos of the Xmas tree........the distortion was terrible......if I took the photo so the treee was straight the wall was crooked, if I made the wall straight the tree looked like it was falling over.....I think its one of these things that fans of WA, deny or just overlook. I think it is not obvious in all photos but some photos can not be corrected in the camera.......

I think it is not obvious in all photos but some photos can not be corrected in the camera.......

Absolutely.

Wide angles will produce some slanted lines at times, especially if you don't hold the camera level. This image is the typical distortion you'll get when you don't hold the camera level. I used the 28mm end of my TZ5 to shoot this sunrise, pointing the camera slightly up to capture more of the sky, resulting in leaning buildings..

I ran the file through a program designed tofix this particular type distortion called Shift-N, which is not going to be anything the camera can correct. The resulting file is below.The 28mm wide angle lens in the TZ5 is as well corrected as you can get. PTLens doesn't even have a profile for it because, as the author of that programsays, there's no distortion there to correct, but you have to use the wide angle setting right, or use a different program that can give you view camera-like corrections.

Good correction.
I don't know if Venus III-IV could correct the lens distortion asit does with vignetting and CA.

My FZ20 had evident WA (36mm eq!) distortion when I shoot at horizons....
And it was hard to avoid while shooting: it caused me that I was practically unable to have right set horizons , thus apart from the barrelling, they always leaned to the reigh or to the left, also using grid while shooting. I started to think there was a problem with the CCD-LCD alignment, instead it was only (uneven) lens-distortion.

Good correction.
I don't know if Venus III-IV could correct the lens distortion asit does with vignetting and CA.

My FZ20 had evident WA (36mm eq!) distortion when I shoot at horizons....
And it was hard to avoid while shooting: it caused me that I was practically unable to have right set horizons , thus apart from the barrelling, they always leaned to the reigh or to the left, also using grid while shooting. I started to think there was a problem with the CCD-LCD alignment, instead it was only (uneven) lens-distortion.

Thanks Narmer!

The Venus engine does correct the bent-line distortion wide angle lenses often exhibit. The TZ2/3/4/5 cameras don't show any bent line distortion, and the FZ18 has the same correction in JPEG files. I've seen some posted files in other forumsto show this correction that can easily be seen when you compare a RAW file to an in-camera JPEG. Since corrections are not applied to RAW files it's an easy way to see just exactly what the Venus engine is doing....if you are using a camera like the FZ18 that give you RAW capture.

FWIW, today I received my FZ28. Great looking camera with a lot of cool features.Severalimage quality options to customize how you want the image to look in addition to just shooting RAW and doing itlater on the computer. Being a bit of a RAW fan, you can bet I'll beusing itboth ways.

I've shot some wide angle images and see absolutely no bent-linedistortion at the wide angle setting. When I get home and have a chance to post some examples I will do so.